Abstract

This paper addresses CoWare: an environment for design of heterogeneous systems on chip. These systems are heterogeneous both in terms of specification and implementation. CoWare is based on a communicating processes data-model which supports encapsulation and refinement and makes a strict separation between functional and communication behaviour. Encapsulation enables the reuse of existing specification and design environments (languages, simulators, compilers). Refinement provides for a consistent and integrated path from specification to implementation. The design steps that will be addressed include: system specification, simulation at various abstraction levels, data path synthesis, communication refinement and hardware/software co-design. A spread-spectrum based pager system serves to illuminate the design process in the CoWare environment.